Our builders are coming in 36 hours. We are both excited and a little daunted. There has been a lot to prepare. One of my jobs has been sorting out this floor. These are terrazzo tiles, buried for years under a layer of stick-on vinyl tiles. The glue and general grubbiness has stained them, and I've spent a lot of time investigating how to restore them to their former glory. There is a way, but it involves industrial machinery and a lot of fuss and mess. We don't have time for that on top of everything else right now, so made the decision to clean them up as best we can for now, and reconsider in the future. First job was to move everything out of the way. You'd think this would have been easy - this room, after all, has been 'empty' for two years. But empty doesn't always mean empty round here, and it took an hour of shifting plasterboard and tools and washing up before it was truly empty. Second job - cleaning. There's a lot of advice about cleaning terrazzo tiles out there, and having tried quite a few suggestions, I can confirm that when your tiles look like this, very little will either help or hinder you. Baking soda, washing up liquid, kitchen cleaner - none of it made much difference. Lithofin Power Clean, £12 a litre, also didn't make much difference. I resorted to using Pink Stuff, and probably somewhere on the internet there are dire warnings against using this mildly abrasive cream cleaner. I stuck with it anyway, mostly because by that point it was quite late at night, and it didn't smell too bad. It removed the general grime, but didn't do much for the stains, and left a slightly gritty residue over the floor when I didn't rinse it off properly. Anyway, on to the next stage - grouting. The gaps between terrazzo tiles are small, but they are there, and these ones were filled more with grime than grout. Another evening on my hands and knees, scraping the muck out of the gaps with a knife, and another quick clean, and a second trip to the DIY shop after we decided the white grout I'd bought would just make the tiles look even more grubby, and we were ready. Grout on a couple of strips, wipe with a big sponge, rinse sponge, wipe again, rinse again, wipe again, hope for the best. It was a long evening, but eventually I got there. I was very grateful for my kneepads by this point. When the grout was dry, it was time for another clean, this time with Tile Doctor Pro Clean, a rather stinky product which apparently removes all remnants of grime, stain, and previous sealant. I bought a mop, applied liberally, followed the instructions to 'agitate after ten minutes', and spent the longest time trying and failing to rinse away all the suds. There was no appreciable improvement in the stains, but at least I hadn't made anything worse. Next up - sealant. This was another stinky substance, a solvent, and soaked into the tiles to provide protection, rather than sitting on top like a varnish. I was grateful for having bought a long roller pole to paint the side of the house a few weeks ago - it saved me from another episode of crawling round the floor. Three coats of sealant, applied then wiped off after half an hour, and the floor looks... not really any different to how it did at the start. A little cleaner, grouted, but not really any shinier, and I suspect the builder will still offer to replace it again like he did on his last visit. But we're quite fond of these ridiculous tiles, although I confess I do wish the red ones were in the middle, as they'll mostly be covered by the kitchen cupboards, leaving the stained cream-coloured ones exposed in the middle of the floor. Hey ho. Our other main job before the builders arrive was removing the bedroom ceiling. Not strictly necessary - it would have taken the builders about ten minutes - but we wanted to remove the cladding carefully so we could keep it for a future project. Even so, it only took us a couple of hours, and is now stored safely in an outbuilding, and will probably be used to clad the bathroom some time next year. Peter has also created me a little office area for me in the temporary kitchen. The builders won't be doing anything to my study, but it's right in the middle of the building work, and this will allow me to be separated from the noise and kerfuffle just a little bit. We'll see how that goes.
I did try saving a few weeks of annual leave so I wouldn't be trying to work when they were here, but they were delayed, and my leave year ended, so here we are. As a last resort I can always go to my actual office, which is open now after being closed since March 2020, but that feels a little drastic, and I won't do that unless things become unbearable here. So there we are. Tomorrow is my final day of a fortnight off, and we need to make sure that all the rest of our stuff is out of the way. Somehow the dining room end of the kitchen is still full of tools and plasterboard and the old oven. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your minimalist tendencies, we have plenty of outbuilding space to store everything. Then on Monday morning we'll take a deep breath and see what the next few weeks bring.
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July was, thankfully, a little less chaotic than June. Two weeks off work, only one trip to the vets, and no visits to the dentist at all. The weather was quite disruptively hot (for round here, anyway), which curtailed any garden activities that didn't involve just lying around. We did make quite a lot of progress in July though, on all kinds of projects. Chicken run extension The most exciting project in July was the chicken run extension. At the end of June, it had three sides and no roof. One pair of friends put in far more effort than we could reasonably have expected, spending four days here lugging stones, mixing concrete, and hauling roof panels, and others helped with smaller tasks, and throughout July a working shelter miraculously appeared. Of course, the garden turned into a building site in the meantime. Eventually it acquired a working door, mesh all the way around, and finally a roof. We still have a couple of additions to make, but it's waterproof (enough) and fox proof, and we are delighted. Tidying up The chicken run extension generated quite a lot of mess in the garden - leftover wood, tools, stones, and all manner of other detritus. Added to the remaining bits of our garden shelter which collapsed over the winter, the garden was a bit of a tip. Hours and hours of shifting and hauling and moving, and a couple of trips to the tip, and we finally had a more spacious parking area and a lawn. I'm utterly delighted. Having both the house and the garden in a mess was getting a bit wearing and I am thrilled to be able to just sit on the lawn. The veg patch and windbreak The veg patch came into its own in July, and was lush and prolific even compared to last July. I spent some time clearing the weeds from part of the edible windbreak, which meant I had to have somewhere to put them, which meant turning the compost, which meant putting the newly made compost onto the veg patch. We didn't do much harvesting in July, but things were slowly starting to get ready. No plums this year, but a few apples, and plenty of kale, beans, squash, tomatoes, basil all looking to be ready soon. Painting the house One job I'd been eyeing up for a while was painting the house, and in July we finally had a warm spell long enough to get on with it. For once, this was much simpler than I'd imagined, and with the aid of a wallpaper scraper taped to a broom handle, and a newly bought roller on a six metre pole, I did the whole thing myself over the course of two evenings. Not perfect, and it'll probably need another coat at some point, but it was straightforward and is good enough for now. Inside the house Inside the house, we're getting ready for the builders. We've chosen our kitchen, and have paid the deposit. We tried so hard to find a second hand one, and very nearly managed it, but sadly it fell through at the last minute, and we've ended up with a handmade one made by some local craftsmen. In the meantime, I've been painting the ceiling, and trying to sort out the floor. We've removed the old vinyl tiles and are have been trying to clean up the terrazzo tiles underneath, which is easier said than done. Apparently the builders are now coming 'later in August' (which I suspect means the end of September - just as my busiest period at work starts) so we need to clean, seal and grout the floor before they get here, as well as taking down the ceiling in the bedroom. Yes, the builders could do that, but we want to keep the cladding and it seems safer (and cheaper) to do it ourselves. Hanging about Quite a lot of July was very warm, and as I had two weeks off work, we spent quite a bit of time just hanging around, both on our own and with visitors. Overall July was pretty relaxed, pretty social, and pretty productive. Let's see if August brings us any closer to a kitchen...
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Hello!Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm Jenni, and I write here about our new foray into country living, which includes growing food, knitting, baking, wandering around the fields, and seeing which local cafe serves the best cake. Categories
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